shair

Saturday, 4 February 2012

Domain Registration and Domain Age

Google now looks at the length of time a domain is registered for. Legitimate
domains are more likely to be paid for several years in advance, while shady
domains are rarely registered for more than a year in advance, since the owner
knows they are likely to be penalized anyway. I recommend you sign up or renew a
domain for at least 2 years, preferably more. Legitimate businesses are in it for the
long haul anyway.

Google may also take into account the rate at which Whois information and DNS
Nameserver is changed for a given domain. Domains that frequently change their
hosting servers and registered owners may be flagged as possible spam domains.

Lastly, Google appears to give more weight to older domains (and hence older sites)
when ranking sites, all other things being equal.

Domain and Subdomain Naming

When a keyword is contained in a domain name or a subdomain, there is a good
chance that the keyword is pretty relevant to the content of the site. A website with a
keyword in the domain name may rank every so slightly higher than another website
that doesn't use keywords in the domain (all other things being equal).

Given a choice between two listings in the search results, an online searcher will
likely choose the listing containing the keyword in the domain name over the listing
that contains unmemorable or is spammy-sounding.

Other tips to consider:

1. The shorter the domain name, the better.

2. Go from specific to generic: houseplans.com is better than planshouse.com

3. Don't use more than one hyphen is you can help it - no more than two hyphens
ever in a domain name.

4. Don't be cute and use the TLD in the domain name, like www.reallygood.info.